Grandia Xtreme
From Disorder to Chaos

Review by Chi Phan

I'm not a huge follower of the Grandia series but I was interested in what Grandia Xtreme had to offer simply cause it's the first Grandia game made for Sony and not Sega. Secondly I was definetly interested in what a Grandia game would look like on the power of the Playstation 2. Too bad my anticipation turned into sorrow when I actually played this game. This game takes a few steps in the wrong direction when compare to the 2 previous Grandia game. Still as a reviewer, I must play this game just for all you gamers out there who plan on buying this game or any game out there. I will feel the pain for you. LOL.

A Grandia World The gang is ready to go Grandia Xtreme story is quite disappointing. It's just too confusing and hard to believe most of the time. It's like watching a B movie and laughing at it as we the movie goers are suppose to take the B movie seriously. The problem with the story is there's a real lack of history developement to it. The story start off with the main character Evann training. Evann has been recieving draft notices from the Nortis Army for the last few days. Well after not getting any replies back from Evann, the army decide to show up at his home and kidnapped him to their base. See, the Nortis Army is on a mission to stop the Elemental Disorder. Inorder to stop the Elemental Disorder, they need to travel deep into different elemental ruins. And they need a Ranger help for that since only a Ranger can open up Geo Gates in the ruins. Geo Gates are little teleporting gateways for quick access back to town. (Obviously they built the story around the gameplay.) Evann just happens to be the only Ranger around so the Nortis Army kidnapped him. After realizing that he can't get out of the Army once he was kidnapped and understanding the importance of stopping the Elemental Disorder, Evann agree to help out the Army in the end. From here Evann joins a band of misfits made up of different countries for a common cause and that's to stop the Elemental Disorder. This band of misfits led by Evann takes orders for the Nortis Army colonel by the name of Kroitz. It appears that Evann and Kroitz has a history with one another. They both are from the same village and they both hate each other. But putting their differences aside for a common cause to stop the Elemental Disorder, Kroitz orders Evann's group to explore the 4 elemental ruins and retrieve the stone slabs buried deep in the ruins. Apparently the stone slabs is the key to stopping the Elemental Disorder. Fast forward to half way into the storyline. Here the plot sort of twist. It becomes predictable and bizaar. After retrieving all of the 4 elemental slabs from the ancient ruins, the Elemental Disorder appears to be stopped. But looks can be deceiving as it appears that Evann group was trick my Colonel Kroitz. It turns out that Colonel Kroitz and the Nortis Army true intention was getting the power of the ancient called Quanlee. The ancients created a ultimate being called Quanlee for some purpose and the Nortis Army is after that power. From this point on the story get's quite confusing. I can't really get into more details as it would mean revealing more spoilers in terms of the story so I'll stop there. But I will say that the entire plot line has major problems. Where to begin? Well let's start off with this great threat called the Elemental Disorder. What is the Elemental Disorder? And why is it such a threat? Don't know. Plain and simple. The Elemental Disorder makes no appearance at all and the story doesn't explain to us what the Elemental Disorder is about and why it's a threat. It's like, let's go on a quest to stop the Elemental Disorder, nevermind the fact that we don't know what the heck is the Elemental Disorder and what's it's about. After collecting all of the stone slabs, we are told that the Elemental Disorder is stopped and there's peace again. Well that's great and all but how is the Elemental Disorder stopped if it never made an appearance to begin with. See my point. Lastly the appearance and purpose of Quanlee is just plain stupid that makes no sense at all. It's almost as if the gamemakers decided to just create Quanlee on a whim just so you the player can have a big final boss to fight against. The character of Quanlee is a mess that Quanlee comes off as an unbelieveable character in the storyline. That's just some of the examples on why the story has so many loopholes that makes the story too unbelievable to believe in. It's like watching a bad B movie and laughing at it.

Look at who's in charge There are mainly 7 characters in this game including party members and supporting cast. Unfortunately the game only focuses on the main character and properly the main bad guy. That's not saying much as even then those 2 characters are underdeveloped. In fact all the characters in this game are underdeveloped in terms of their background on who they are and where they are from. For example, your party members are main up of different groups from different countries serving together for a common cause. That's fine but where are they from in terms of what village or cities. Do they have families or anything really sad about their past? What were their occupation before they join to help stop the Elemental Disorder? No answer for those questions. Prime example would be Evann the main character. What village is Evann from? No idea. Does Evann have a family? No idea. Evann and Kroitz (the main bad guy) are from the same village and they both hate each other. Evann thinks Kroitz is an arrogant son of a bitch who's self center. That's great and all but why does Evann think Kroitz is so arrogant and evil? What went on between the 2 in the past back in their village? Nothing... no answer to those questions at all. That's just how poorly developed the characters are in this game. We know literally nothing about them. With so little character developement, we can't care about these characters at all and unfortunately with that in mind, the characters come off as plain.

Feel my power! Well let's see here. The last Grandia game was Grandia 2 and that game was originally release on the Dreamcast. A system that is pretty much weaker than the Playstation 2 in terms of power and graphics. So you would think there would been much improvement on the graphic since Grandia 2 for this game but that's not the case. Grandia Xtreme graphics are exactly like that of Grandia 2. It's not better and it's not worse. Just the same. You are looking at a 3-D world with a smooth polygon texture. Unfortunately the overall look of the game isn't very appealing. For one the colors aren't very good. The game looks very dull in color and dark as well.The character designs are okay I suppose. But if you look very carefully and closely, you will notice some jaggies on some of the images. Which is not a good thing. Then there's the CGI movies. The game doesn't possess alot of CGI movies but the ones that are feature aren't that great to look at. Most of the CGI are very dark and dull and there are hardly any characters CGI other than the main character. In terms of graphic, it certainly can be done better. I gave Grandia 2 a 7 so I'll give a 7 here since the graphics are pretty much the same.

Quanlee is my name.. Game music is about average. Maybe it's just me but it seem like with each new Grandia game, the music get worse and worse. Here the game doesn't focuses much on the music. I guess that reason can be due to the way the game is set up. Unlike previous Grandia games where you are on a quest around the world, here the game is pretty much a dungeon crawling game so music isn't what would be consider the fore front on this game. Also missing is the beautiful Grandia theme which would normally be feature throughtout this game. I guess there's a somewhat poor remix of the Grandia theme but it's not very good. Overally you hardly notice the music in this game at all. Of course there's a mini game where you can get the usually traditional Grandia music like Grandia theme and Granseal but these are songs or music from previous games and not this game. Average music at best if you notice the music at all. The only time that you really notice the good Grandia Xtreme original music is when you finish the game and the extra bonus dungeon. Once you finish the extra bonus dungeon, you get the final sound bite for your music and the alternative ending really has excellent music. But you know what? I don't want to wait till I finish the game and play a bonus dungeon to finally get good music. I want to listen to it while I'm playing the game and not when I'm finish with the game. The sound and effects in this game isn't too bad at all. Now there's alot of voice acting in this game. The voice acting isn't bad in terms the actors. Some of the more well known actors feature are Dain Cain, Mark Hamil, and Lisa Loeb. But unfortunately this game doesn't really need voice acting at all. In fact the voice acting seem out of place in this game. Another part is that while the voice acting is good, the script that the voice actors are required to read out or act out is pretty bad. You can't fault the voice actor for this since they have so little to work with in the beginning. Overall music, sound, and voice acting are okay or just a little better than okay. I do not count music from previous Grandia games as part of this game music. Especially when those music don't appear on the actually gameplay but can only be gotten through a mini game.

Yeah? What do you want? I wouldn't hurt a fly. Game Information    Genre: Turn Base Rpg    Publisher: Enix    Disc: 1 Disc DVD    Memory: 64 KB    Players: 1 Player Mode    Vibration: Yes    Dual Analog: Yes    Digital Control: Yes    Rating: Teen    Release: October 2002 Gameplay? Just thinking about the gameplay scares me. LOL. That should tell you what I think about the gameplay. Battle system is pretty much the same as Grandia 2 but the rest of gameplay is different. Previous Grandia games is about exploration and traveling around the world to different places. Grandia Xtreme works more in a way as a dungeon crawling game. You have various dungeons to explore in and one town only. This town will provide you with shops and a save point. This is your place for everything. The objective is to save your game at town then head out and explore whatever dungeon you're suppose to explore to progess the story further. Now one problem here and it's a very big problem is that there's only one save point in the entire game. Having to go back to town inorder to save is very annoying. Basically let's start off with how the game works. You do what you need to do inorder to stock up and head off to the dungeon. Once you arrived at a dungeon, you do what most rpgs require you to do and that's to explore the entire dungeon. Solve whatever puzzles that needs to be solve inorder to progress deeper into the dungeon to fight the dungeon boss. The dungeon itself isn't too much hard. It's just like a giant size maze with puzzles to solve. The puzzles for the most part aren't too difficult. One thing to note and that is that you can't save in the dungeon. As you progress deep into the dungeon, you will encounter Geo Gates. Only Evann can activate these Geo Gates. Geo Gates are gateway for the players to teleport back to town or for players to teleport into the dungeon at the point where the Geo Gate is located. Unfortunately the Geo Gates aren't placed in areas of the dungeon that are too helpful for you. They are either in the middle of the dungeon or near the beginning. Secondly, everytime you leave the dungeon and go back into the dungeon, you will have to resolve all puzzles that are inside the dungeon again. It doesn't matter if you already solve or activated whatever switches that needed to be solve on your first time there. This is a major annoyance for the gamers. One that makes going back to dungeons a pain in the ass on top of the lack of save points. Monsters roam about in the dungeons. You can see them but avoiding them is kind of hard. When you are close to a monster or run into a monster, battle will ensue. Here's another thing that is against this game. I don't mind battle encounter but 90% of all battle encounters result in a Surprised Attack in favor of the monsters taking the first shot. This can sometime result in your party getting killed. I can understand if a monster sneak up behind you and get an advantage of a Surprised Attack as that's normal but even when you run into the monsters head on face to face or even sneak up on a monster, they still get the advantage of a Surprised Attack. Which is why 90% of all battle encounters result in a Surprised Attack in favor of the monters. I really hate that. This game is pretty much a dungeon crawling game with only one town to supply your needs and save point. It wouldn't be so bad if there were more save points available and the way the encounter are more evenly favored to both parties instead of toward the monters. Now this game isn't hard or anything, just that these annoyances will kill the enjoyment of the game. I mean with the lack of save point especially in dungeon, you really have to make sure you have lots of free time on your hands when you decide to explore a dungeon. That's something that most gamers won't have. Next stop is the magic system. Once again Grandia Xtreme magic system is base on Mana Eggs. If you are familiar with previous Grandia games then you would know that magic spells are deprived from elemental eggs. Each egg comes with it's own element with spells specific to these elements as well as the level of the eggs. As you equip the eggs, and use your magic spells in battle, your magic spells will gain levels. The higher the level, the faster you are able to cast that magic spell. Leveling up magic spells doesn't not mean the magic spell will be more powerful. Inorder to get more powerful magic spells, you need to merge different Mana Eggs to get a more power Level Mana Eggs. This is where the Mana Eggs system are different from previous Egg system. Here you can completely customize your Mana Eggs into different combos to produce many different kind of Mana Eggs. There's quite alot of different combos to produce. I really enjoy this feature. Downside? Like with previous Mana Eggs, each spells within the eggs comes with a certain amount of MP to be used. Once you used up those MPs, you can't really cast anymore spell. And items to replenish your MPs are hard to come by so casting magic spell in dungeons are done on a limited usage to conserve MP for the more difficult battles. You can only replenish your Mana Eggs Mp by resting in town. Again a pain in the ass. And makes the magic system pretty useless due to the conserving of MPs. People want to use magic but they can't cause they have to conserve it for the right time. That's not right. Takes away the enjoyment of the game. Status skills or extra skills to help your party. You can equip special status helping skills to members of your partys. These status skills range from extra strength to doing extra or more damage to certain type of monsters. First, skills comes in scrolls. Monsters pretty much drop these scrolls once they are defeated. When you get a scroll, you can take them into a shop in town to have these scrolls created into a status skills. Each skills comes in 3 different rank. Rank A, B, and C. You equip these skills onto skills book which you in turn equip the skill books onto a party members. Skill books comes in different types as well as different Ranks. You can pretty much find these Skill Books inside treasure chests in dungeons. So now the skill system is explain. Magic system is explain. And the main gameplay is explain. All that's left is the battle system. Battle System: The battle system is very familiar to Grandia 2. You have the basic commands: items, special moves, magic, combo, and critical. I don't think I need to explain what the items and magic commands are for. Special moves are your characters special attacks. Combo is your basic attack where your fighters do combination of attack on a monster. Critical attack is one big swing attack against the monster. The sole purpose of a critical attack is to cancel the enemys attack turn. Like with Grandia 2, the battle system is a turn base action fight. Your party members and monsters run around in a 3-D environment battling each other. The turn base is done an IP guage. IP guage is measure in two portions. Move and Action. You can see little images of your fighters and monsters on this IP Gauge. Move is when your guys and monsters are running around waiting for their turn to do an action. Once their little images on the IP Gauge goes from the Move portion to the Action portion, it means that their turn to take an action is up. Of course an action is dictated by what commands you choose. You can cancel a monster action or the monster can cancel your action by hitting a character/monster who's in the process of doing an Action with the critical command. One thing to note here which is somewhat unique and different from Grandia 2. You now have Special Combo Attacks between members of 2 or 3 party members created by regular party members Special Moves. Basically these Special Combo Attacks are drawn from party members performing certain type of Special Moves together to get off one really strong attack. This is very cool. With 7 party members all with their own unique Special Moves, the combination of different Special Combo Attacks available is immense. I like it. Although I rarely use these Special Combo Attacks cause they take too long to perform. Now these Special Moves all start off with level 1. You level up your Special Moves by the number of times you use them in battles. The higher the level, the faster you are able to perform them. That should conclude our summary of the battle system which in turn concludes our summary of the entire gameplay. Overall I enjoy the battles. But that's about it. The lack of save point and the way that 90% of all battles encounter are in Surprised Attack killed any real enjoyment I had of the game. Also the fact that everytime I re-enter the dungeon I have to re-do and resolve all the puzzles again which is very annoying as hell. In the end, I did not enjoy this game at all and will probably never play this game again.

Score: 6/10

At last the final sound bite.. Hmm...okay in terms of extras in the game. There not much. No side quests to do and one mini game. A mini game that doesn't really give you anything. The basic of the mini game is a music game. There's a band that needs help in coming up with a song or theme for them. Inorder to help them out you need to find sound bites. Once you collect enough sound bites they will come up with a theme sound which you can listen to at your leisure. There's about 4 songs in total. 2 of the most noticeable are Granseal (Grandia 2 theme) and Grandia theme (Grandia theme). Basically songs that are from past Grandia games. You don't get anything from collecting these sounds bites other than the pleasure of listening to them. While you listen to them there's a little mini-mini game of the music game. You can make Carros perform with the song while the songs are playing. Carros are Grandia mascot like chocobos are Final Fantasy mascots. What do you get from getting these Carros to dance along with the music mini games? Nothing much. The music is nice to listen to but you would hope to get something for the mini games like a reward. Now you can only collect and find Sound Bites and Carros in the various dungeons. But they will only appear once you have cleared the dungeons the first time. But again it's a pain in the butt to do cause you have to redo all the dungeons again. Now that's all the mini game and extra for the game during the actually game. Replay value is pretty good in terms of hours of gameplay. Once you finish the game, there's a bonus dungeon that you can play in. This bonus dungeon is 100 floors long. Which is good in terms of extra hours of gameplay. I would dare to say that you will probably spend just about the same amount of gameplay on the bonus dungeon as you would on the regular gameplay hours. The only problem is that dungeon in itself is very annoying and not fun to play in. Each floor of the dungeon is random but the main thing that kills the enjoyment of the bonus dungeon is once again the lack of save point. The bonus dungeon works much in the same way as the dungeon late in the game when you can only have access to a Geo Gate every 5 floors. But unlike the regular dungeons in the game, the bonuse dungeon have these stipulations in place that makes saving your progress in the bonus dungeon even more harder. I did not have fun playing the bonus dungeon at all. It was also a letdown making it all the way to the top only to find out that you don't get an extra boss fight or anything. Just the final sound bite to listen to a really good ending music theme and to see an alternative endings which looks pretty much the same as the original ending. Great offering in terms of gameplay for replay value but enjoyment of actually playing it is a different matter. Extra dungeons and mini games are suppose to be fun as that's what their main purpose is for. Fun was not what I'm having when it comes to the extra dungeon and getting the stuff needed to complete the music mini game.

Grandia Xtreme does more damage to the Grandia series then help it. On the bright side this game is called Grandia Xtreme and not Grandia 3 so maybe Gamearts can make a real Grandia 3 with better story and everything. Let's face it, Grandia Xtreme is a disappointment. It's not a very well thoughtout game from Gamearts. You might want to pick up this game when it's cheap or in the used bin but stay away from it as there are many better Playstation 2 rpgs out there. Final Score: 6/10 Time to complete: about 30 hours. Not including the bonus dungeon. Difficulty: Easy Favorite character: Titto Best music theme: Grandia Theme Most useful magic: Alheal Best fighter: Brandol Best Move: Sky Dragon Slash Best advice: Don't buy it. Rent it. Also try: Grandia 2 Up next: Wild Arms 3

STORY An uninteresting and non believable storyline that is poorly developed. 5 CHARACTERS Characters have absolutely no background developement at all. 5 GRAPHICS The same graphics as Grandia 2. No improvement at all despite being release on a stronger system than the Dreamcast. 7 MUSIC/SOUND A mix of old tunes and new tunes. Most of the good tunes are from the previous Grandia games. 7 GAMEPLAY To simple put. Lack of save points hurt this game big time. Did not enjoy this game. 6 EXTRAS/REPLAY One mini game and one bonus dungeon but again the gameplay kills any enjoyment out of exploring the extra dungeon. 6